The Greatest Swan Song in History
It’s now three months since the Beatles Remasters spun into our lives and it’s been an amazing journey. Now the dust has settled, we can begin to judge their quality detached from the hype.
And what quality. Every single CD has been a revelation, from the raw almost feral power of Please Please Me to the splintered wake of Let It Be. The listening experience has been revelatory, with ultra-familiar tracks taking on a whole new life of their own and forgotten gems suddenly being revealed as lost classics.
But of all the albums, none shines so brightly in the galaxy of rock as the group’s majestic swan song, Abbey Road. Never have the Beatles sounded so warm and yet so edgy. Never have they sounded better. The album is a beautiful, life-affirming testament to the power of music to move the listener and the 2009 Remaster has taken the experience to a whole new level.
Come Together, the funkiest album opener of their career, positively bounds out of the speaker, like a dog that has been chained up for too long. Of course, it sounds brilliant and it’s little surprise that the bass is so full and forceful. But as with so many of the albums, this remaster hits you will a killer sucker punch. Just as you’re marvelling at the speaker-popping bass, along comes a guitar part that is rawer, sexier and damn right dirtier than it has ever sounded before. Not for the first time you ask yourself it it was even on the original record, although you know it was.
And so it goes on. Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, one of the most derided things the band ever recorded, is revealed as a scary and menacing trip of a tune. If the Stones had recorded it, critics would have been wowed by its tale of a judge-killing serial killer. The fact the whole thing is cloaked in a melodic, misleadingly simple tune is further proof of the band’s ability to wrong foot the listener.
I Want You (She’s so Heavy) has always been a little mad. The new sound lets it break from the asylum of despair to rampage its way from your speakers with stunning guitar work, mixed with a vocal that treads a line between deranged despair and soulful pleading. When it ends – famously mid bar – it’s as if you have been yanked back up the rabbit hole to a reality that isn’t quite as you remember it.
The side two medley is as close to perfect as any band has probably ever managed. So much greater than the sum of its parts, the remastering nevertheless reveals some mesmerising performances. You Never Give Me Your Money is rescued from its world weary business lunch feel and transported onto an open highway. Yes, the party’s almost over the songs seems to be saying, but Christ was it fun.
Perhaps the single greatest moment of the Abbey Road remaster comes 43 seconds into Golden Slumbers. In a way, it’s a moment that stands for the entire remastered series. When McCartney sings the line, “smiles awake you when you rise” the world seems to stop for a moment. Hairs stand up on the back of your neck and you find yourself wondering where the hell that came from. Surely you’d never heard so much emotion in that one line before?
It’s a stunning and truly moving moment. When, just a few short minutes later, The End finishes with that famous final couplet, you are left realising once and for all that for all the great music still to be recorded and for all the classic records of the 1970s, things would never be quite that great again.
